Introduction - Governing Transboundary Waters: Canada, the United States, and Indigenous Communities - page 14

water governance to include social and political contexts. In closing, I present a
list of lessons learned that help answer the question, “What makes a good upstream
neighbor”.
An interlude - my parable of discovery
How I came to be working on transboundary water justice is a long and winding
path. Early in life, I was positioned to think beyond the constructs of “nationality”
and “citizenship”. Although I didn't realize this until much later, my early
beginnings in life had a profound impact on my worldview.
I was born a foreigner. My parents moved from Chicago, Illinois to Sydney,
Australia in their early twenties. Many things influenced their decision to leave,
but the tragic events at Kent State University - where four unarmed college students
were killed and nine injured by national guardsmen while protesting about the
Vietnam War - was their tipping point. The Kent State shootings so angered and
saddened my parents that they felt compelled to leave their home in search of a
better life. Although they had no immediate plans beyond “leaving”, my father
eventually secured a job with the sales division of British Airways. It was a job
that, it turned out, took him - and us - around the world many times over.
Being born “abroad” positioned me early in life to think of myself more as a
global citizen than a person tied to a particular country. Although my family
eventually moved back to North America, the early imprinting of being born
somewhere else - and experiencing different cultures at an early age - tended to
make me slightly aloof to the concepts of nationalism and citizenship and the
concept of sticking within the delineations of a single home country. Because of
my parents' political sensibilities, I was also sensitized early on to ideas of “justice”
and “political action”.
I am sure that this early exposure in life led me down my academic path. As
an undergraduate at a small liberal arts college in Maine, I chose International Studies
as my major, partly because of the interdisciplinary nature of its offerings and partly
because of the opportunity to study abroad. The history, economics, anthropology,
and environmental policy courses provided tools to start understanding the
complexities and asymmetries of the world order. But, it was not until my junior
year study abroad in Nepal that a new piece of the world puzzle was presented to
me - a piece that had (and continues to have) profound impacts on me. At the
age of 20, living in the outskirts of Kathmandu with a family of six who had 2
hours of electricity per week and no running water, influenced me in ways that
no textbook ever could. What I learned in Nepal are lessons that I carry with me
today. I learned about the tremendous discrepancies of wealth and standards of
living, and the struggles many face just to survive on a daily basis.
Living in Nepal, I also learned that access to clean water should not be taken
for granted. Living for 3 months without running water, I saw what it meant to
rely on the local stream for everything - your weekly wash, your drinking water,
washing dishes, and bathing. Getting severely sick as a result of contaminated water
also made me understand - viscerally - the physical impacts of poverty. However,